March 22, 2024
Shakespeare’s greatest song appears in his last major play, The Tempest, a sudden, oracular lyric, hauntingly strange:
Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea change Into something rich and strange.
Young prince Ferdinand, alone on a desert island, is indeed grieving the loss of his father in a tempest and shipwreck. But in fact, Ferdinand’s father is very much alive, so the song on a literal level seems a pointless piece of misdirection. But whenever anything in Shakespeare appears irrelevant on the horizontal level of the forward-moving plot, we suspect it functions instead on a vertical level of imagery and theme. The song speaks of death as a change, and so it is, the change of someone we knew into otherness. Death does transmute, but not so beautifully and mysteriously as this, as anyone knows who has confronted the dead body of a loved one. What is lying in the bed both is and yet is no longer the one we loved. It has become, or is becoming, something alien. I do not think it is unkind or unloving to admit this, just emotionally honest. At any rate, the theme of the alien is worth meditating upon, especially in its relation to death.
Jung, in the chapter called “On Life after Death” in his extraordinary autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recounts a dream he had the night before the death of his mother. “Seldom has a dream so shaken me,” he says of it (313). The dream was of the god Wotan (or Odin) in his role as the Wild Huntsman, carrying away a soul to the land of the dead. But after the dream, exactly like Ferdinand, except in this case the death was actual, Jung heard music from an unseen source:
I went home immediately, and while I rode in the night train I had a feeling of great grief, but in my heart of hearts I could not be mournful, and this for a strange reason: during the entire journey I continually heard dance music, laughter, and jollity, as though a wedding were being celebrated. This contrasted violently with the devastating impression the dream had made on me….One side of me had a feeling of warmth and joy, and the other of terror and grief; I was thrown back and forth between these contrasting emotions. | This paradox can be explained if we suppose that at one moment death was being represented from the point of view of the ego, and at the next from that of the psyche. In the first case it appeared as a catastrophe; that is how it so often strikes us, as if wicked and pitiless powers had put an end to a human life. | And so it is—death is indeed a fearful piece of brutality; there is no sense pretending otherwise. It is brutal not only as a physical event, but far more so psychically: a human being is torn away from us, and what remains is the icy stillness of death. There is no longer any hope of a relationship, for all the bridges have been smashed at one blow. | From another point of view, however, death appears as a joyful event. In the light of eternity, it is a wedding, a mysterium coniunctionis. The soul attains, as it were, its missing half, it achieves wholeness. (314)
A character in a play by the Roman dramatist Terence says that “Nothing human is alien to me,” but in fact the alien is part of the human, turned away from the familiar part like the dark side of the moon. The alien, which is the Other, exists in nature, in other people, and in ourselves, and the experience of the Other can be sublime and terrible (which is what the tendency to capitalize it signifies). The Earth describes it to Prometheus in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound:
Ere Babylon was dust, The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden. That apparition, sole of men, he saw. For know there are two worlds of life and death: One that which thou beholdest; but the other Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit The shadows of all forms that think and live Till death unite them and they part no more…. There thou art…. (Act 1, lines 191-99, 203)
Zoroaster’s image is a second self, one that dwells in a reality that is the other side of ordinary life. This hidden realm of otherness, which I have called the Otherworld, is from one point of view death, but not ordinary death, for it is “underneath” the grave. It is, rather, death as something rich and strange. Shelley locates the Otherworld downward and inward, as is usual in Romantic mythology. But modern science fiction produced a re-orientation in which the Otherworld was located upward, as “outer space.” I suspect that the directional ambiguity is yet another aspect of the human double perspective. To the ordinary ego, outer space is an inhuman realm of alienation, but to the psyche or Self (as Jung called it) it is a realm of mystery and wonder that is in a twin-world relationship with the depths below.
With science fiction came the theme of the alien projected as coming from outer space, and with it came the ambivalent characterization of space itself as realm of alienation and yet also realm of wonder. The portrayal of intelligent alien beings in science fiction can be charted as a spectrum ranging between those extremes:
1. On the negative side of the spectrum, the alien may be truly inhuman in both body and mind. H.G. Wells’s Martians in The War of the Worlds are physically monstruous, with intellects that are, in the often-quoted phrase, “vast and cool and unsympathetic.” The aliens of the Alien films seem part insectile, part reptilian. Jung makes the point that human beings find it easy to experience other mammals anthropomorphically, but the further away a creature is from the warm-blooded, the more alien and other it seems: hence the phobic reaction to snakes, spiders, and so on. But the fact that the aliens burst out of people’s chests is the true horror, not just because it is gory but because of the suggestion that the alien lurks within us. These aliens are an attempt to represent the nature of true evil, a malevolence with no rational motive, which would to some degree humanize it. Their evil is what Coleridge called Iago’s, “motiveless malignity.” Such beings are scientifically rationalized versions of the traditional demonic creatures of mythology, such as Tiamat, the female sea monster out of whose body the hero Marduk makes the world in the Babylonian Creation myth, and in Beowulf Grendel and his mother. All of these cases are depth-dwellers. The Biblical archetype is the sea monster Leviathan, who metaphorically is the sea of chaos and death.
2. Some aliens are other and yet not malevolent. The sandworms in Frank Herbert’s Dune books, brilliantly represented in Denis de Villeneuve’s Dune movies, are stunningly alien, but not really evil, any more than an erupting volcano is evil. Such natural otherness is what the Romantics called the sublime. Perhaps the profoundest study of the alien as Other in science fiction is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, whose ocean may or may not be alive and intelligent, but which is so completely Other that all attempts at explanation shatter against it like waves upon the rocks. Anything completely Other would be utterly incomprehensible, and would therefore resemble the definition of God as “absolutely other” in such works as Rudolf Otto’s The Holy. An epiphany of God as absolutely Other forms the climax of the Book of Job, in which Yahweh appears out of a whirlwind and boasts that he can land Leviathan with a hook. Alien plants can be demonic, especially if they are ambulatory as in The Day of the Triffids, or they can be images of incomprehensible otherness. The explorers in Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Vaster than Empires and More Slow” come to realize that the vegetation of the planet they have landed upon is one gigantic, sentient organism. In an exquisite irony, it reacts with hostility because it views the explorers as frighteningly alien.
3. There are many beings in mythology, folktale, and literature that have monstrous bodies but hearts of gold, in which case they are fellow creatures, and easy vehicles for sermons on not judging by appearances. We think immediately of “The Beauty and the Beast”; those whose imaginations were shaped in early life by superhero comics think also of the Thing in the Fantastic Four. He looks like a walking pile of orange rocks, but his girlfriend Alicia finds him beautiful because she is blind and “sees” him with her sensitive fingers. As these examples show, seeing beneath rough appearances is a task often delegated to a woman. In Guillermo del Toro’s lovely parable The Shape of Water, the alien looks (deliberately) like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but Sally Hawkins falls humanly, romantically, and, in a daring scene, erotically in love with him.
4. Not all aliens are monstrous. Some are just plain cute, no other word for it. The titular alien in Robert Heinlein’s The Star Beast (1954) is a high school student’s pet, named Lummox. He grows first into a nuisance, large enough to devour a car, then into an interstellar incident, as it turns out he is a member of the royalty of a race powerful enough to destroy the earth. But all ends well, as it does in the famous Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” (1967). Tribbles are completely harmless and, well, cute: squeaking and cooing balls of fur that do nothing but eat and reproduce. How fertile are they? They are born pregnant, and they hilariously overrun the Enterprise. The plot of H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy (1962) consists of the attempt to prove that the humanoid, golden-furred Fuzzies are sentient, thus preventing their and their planet’s exploitation.
5. Some aliens are beautiful rather than monstrous, and yet inhuman. They are often an irresistible temptation to human beings. Older examples are largely female: the sirens, lamias, and mermaids of myth and folklore. But not entirely: the bad-for-you-but-hot vampires in the Twilight series return the vampire myth to its erotic origins: Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a masterpiece of Victorian barely suppressed sexuality. But the Twilight vampires are at the same time a partial crossover with the Beauty and the Beast pattern.
6. Among the most interesting representations of aliens in science fiction are those whose physical forms differ only in minor ways from human beings but whose ways of thinking are so radically different that it is a question whether peaceful relations are possible. Among the most distinguished are the Foreigner series of C.J. Cherryh, now up to 22 volumes and counting. The recurrent character of the Foreigner books is a diplomat desperately trying to understand the alien people known as the Atevi, in order to prevent inter-species catastrophe due to misunderstanding. Cherryh is exploring what may be the true problem of our time: how to preserve community and civilization in the face of difference. The Atevi are humanoid and intelligent, but they think so differently from human beings that each species is constantly on the verge of finding the other intolerable. Because she is writing science fiction, Cherryh can get away with probing a question that would probably be too politically volatile to confront realistically: while much difference is obviously cultural and learned, are there, on a deep level, differences that are neurologically based? For that is true of the Atevi. They are incapable even of understanding love and friendship, let alone feeling them. Instead they are hard-wired for what translates as “loyalty,” a bond to a leader.
There is a reason that “social construction” has become dogma in some quarters, for if at least some human differences are not learned but are the product of biological drives, they are unchangeable, and the only recourse then is to learn to work around them. However, even if human behaviors turn out to be socially imprinted, that takes place on such a deep level that some behaviors might as well be deemed innate. Getting along is going to take more than a few periodic consciousness-raising exercises. The effort required to cope with deep-seated human differences is so great that the danger is that people will give up in frustration and dismiss the other group as “barbaric,” or some other word meaning not really human. Over the many years that this series has been evolving—and these novels are serious fiction, not formula adventure books—it has come to seem more and more prophetic, as millions of people around the world are attaching themselves in cultlike fashion to various authoritarian leaders. People who try to talk to family members that have been “converted” to such loyalty find that it is like talking to an alien: it is no longer the person they once knew. Such loyalty is pathological, but it is a perversion of a genuine impulse. In literature, personal loyalty to a leader is as old as the Anglo-Saxon comitatus group, and it dominates Shakespeare’s King Lear, where it is linked with the theme of what is “natural.” We abhor “groupthink,” but are we evolutionarily predisposed to it?
However, the alien is by no means always projected as another species. Other works of science fiction modify the old tag from the comic strip Pogo to “We have met the alien, and he is us.” Human beings are increasingly capable of modifying what they are “naturally,” making themselves alien by traditional norms. As modern genetics became aware of the role of mutation in species modification, the theme of spontaneous generation of a “mutant” or whole mutant species began to appear in both serious science fiction and popular culture, in Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John (1935) and Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human (1953) but also in the X-Men comics (and later movies), always accompanied by the theme of fear and hatred of the “mutie” as a kind of alien. In science fiction of the Cold War era, the mutations were typically not spontaneous but caused by radiation after a nuclear war. But medical advances also raised the possibility of the deliberate biological modification of human beings, often to enable them to live in harsh or alien environments. As early as Clifford Simak’s City (1952), people are bioengineered to survive the ferocious gravity and climate of Jupiter—people who end up abandoning the human race and living on Jupiter by themselves, having become true aliens. Samuel R. Delany’s story “Driftglass” (1971) depicts a world in which some people are surgically equipped with gills to live undersea. It is pervaded with allusions to The Tempest, by way of Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror, and the title refers to the transformation by the sea of the glass of old bottles into something rich and strange that people collect. It is the younger generation who become surgically implanted and leave home to live a new life, thereby becoming alien to their parents. The young do this in every generation, without the help of implants, becoming “alien” to their bewildered parents. This is one illustration of what I mean when I say that the alien is part of human nature rather than outside it. In addition, it is a law of linguistics that languages are constantly changing, and, if the change becomes radical enough, a dialect may become a new language, as Latin became French, Italian, and Spanish. The hostility evoked by non-standard dialects of English is a fear of the alien, a fear that is everywhere.
The other path to making the human into the increasingly alien is technological rather than biological, resulting in the cyborg, half machine and half human. The default method of making a cyborg is to start with a human being and add technology that is part of the person’s body rather than just a tool used by that body. However much young people seem to be attached to them, having a smartphone does not automatically make one a cyborg. Glasses, contacts, and hearing aids have a more intimate relationship to the body, and pacemakers, which are actually grafted into it, even more so. Parts of some people have been surgically replaced with metal; I have had cataract surgery, and so see the world through artificial lenses that are part of my body. Donna Haraway’s widely influential essay of 1985, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” argued that human identity is flexible and cannot be defined by distinguishing it from the animal and the machine. We are both human and animal, and we are fast becoming both human and machine. The monsters of older mythology represented the violent and chaotic forces of nature, but since the 18th century humanity has been both imagining and creating its own monsters through technology. Victor Frankenstein’s monster was a do-it-yourself patchwork assemblage of organic body parts, but animated scientifically, by electricity rather than alchemy or magic. The moral of the story is the one so often associated with the alien, for the “monster” turns out to be a noble being, what is truly monstrous being the inflated ego of its creator. Later cyborgs incorporate more and more of the machine, often, as with surgical enhancements, in order to enable humanity to live in alien environments, as in Frederick Pohl’s Man Plus (1976), which speculates that, due to harsh conditions, Mars will be colonized by cyborgs rather than ordinary human beings. Cyborgs are sometimes imagined as the future of warfare, including of course James Cameron’s Terminator.
How much of the organic body can be replaced without the entity ceasing to be human? Catherine Moore’s classic story “No Woman Born” (1944) imagines a dancer’s brain transplanted after an accident into a mechanical body possessing strength and grace in performance beyond any human capability. But the woman feels her human warmth fading away into machine coldness. Fears of dehumanization, of becoming alien, do not haunt everyone, however. For those who call themselves posthumanists, escaping the body and the irrational emotions is viewed as an emancipation. If consciousness simply consists of patterns of information, and human identity is equated with consciousness, then human beings can theoretically be uploaded into virtual cybernetic space. Would such uploaded identities be human or alien, however? Coming from the other direction is the robot, the intelligent machine approaching humanness, at least supposedly. There has from the beginning been an anxiety about malevolent robots. Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are installed in the software of all robots to limit their capacity to make decisions hostile to their creators. All the old fears of a robot revolution have now been refurbished as a fear of AI, which is simply a robot without a humanoid body. Yet human empathy has a powerful tendency to humanize robots, from R2D2 and C3P0 to Star Trek’s Data, who is an android, a robot made out of fleshlike materials. Philip K. Dick’s attitude towards the android is more ironic, however. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the androids can imitate human behavior perfectly up to the point of failing one crucial test: they are incapable of empathy. In Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1982), based on Dick’s novel, there are suggestions that Deckard, whose job is to eliminate “replicants,” may be one himself. As with his Alien films, there is a preoccupation with the alien lurking within the human.
Nothing blurs the human boundaries like the polymorphic urges of sexuality, and human-machine interplay extends (so to speak) from vibrators to sex dolls to the imagining of love affairs between human and machine, including the relationship between Wanda, the superhero known as the Scarlet Witch, and the Vision, who is an android. Haraway was right: the line between human and mechanical simply cannot be drawn in any simple way.
The boundary between human beings and animals is even more ambiguous. Enlightenment rationalism tended to define the human as the rational. Emotions and the powerful drives rooted in the unconscious, which are also part of human nature, were nonetheless denigrated as “animal.” They are inferior, leading in the direction of “savagery,” and must be strictly controlled. Wild animals were alien and threatening, and the craze for hunting among the British aristocracy, whether it was foxes or big game animals, was, however unconsciously, part of the imperialist project of “civilizing” the world. Consequently, the compensatory imagination produced Tarzan, Lord Greystoke, who left the aristocracy and went back to living with those magnificent aliens the great apes. Many years later, life imitated art, and Diane Fossey lived with the mountain gorillas, Jane Goodall with the chimpanzees, daring an unprotected, face to face encounter with the Other. To domesticate animals is to humanize them, and to say that owners come to resemble their pets is a way of hinting that, in some households, humans and pets are co-equals. Cartoon animals are another way by which animals are anthropomorphized and thus cease to be alien as they are when encountered in the wild. I live in semi-rural North Royalton partly because of my daily interaction with wild animals, which gives me something that interaction with a pet cannot give, though it can give other things.
The boundary between human and alien other is transcended by empathy—except of course when it isn’t. We arguably do better empathizing with machines and animals than with our fellow human beings. People of different races, countries, sexual identifications, even different “foreign” languages are hated and feared as other, even when they are not, in the significant phrase, “illegal aliens.” This is often true of those, often older, often rural, who have little experience of any kind of difference, and who rely on descriptions provided by Fox News and bigoted politicians. Higher education works against the anxious tendency to turn people into “the other” not so much by preaching tolerance but simply by giving first-generation college students the experience of living amidst all kinds of different people. I think, though, that empathy has to be understood in a complex way. While people do need to develop the capacity to see universal human needs and feelings beneath surface differences, that is in danger of becoming an attitude of “We’re really just all alike,” which is a form of narcissism. The impulse to identify with needs to be counterbalanced by an actual attraction to difference as something fascinating and valuable. Some people travel, not to stay in Western style hotels and eat at McDonalds but to encounter other people in other cultures, and it is precisely the difference that they are drawn to. Whatever was true in life, the literary friendships between white men and native peoples—between Leatherstocking and Chingachgook, between Ishmael and Queequeg, have something meaningful in them beneath the colonial limitations, even if the limitations are there too.
In relationships of any sort, human beings are to some extent aliens to each other, and the success of the relationship depends on how two people cope with the fact that the other person—yes, even the “soul mate”—is on the one hand a kindred spirit and on the other bafflingly, disconcertingly, frustratingly, at times even irritatingly different. To joke that men are from Mars and women are from Venus is another way of saying that we are aliens to each other, from different planets, to which we should add trans and nonbinary individuals, who are no more alien than anyone else, merely less familiar. You can live with someone for years and still be at times utterly baffled and frustrated at how they think and react. What is even worse is that they find you alien too, even though you are sure that you are perfectly normal and understandable. There is no remedy for this except empathy and a sense of humor, and maybe a little therapy during the rough patches. It pays to remind oneself that the other’s tantalizing otherness was part of the fascination that drew you to them in the first place: vive la différence. If you have serial relationships over the course of a lifetime, you will find yourself landing, time after time, on the shores of a mysterious unknown country. Even if you run to type, every person you fall in love with will be different. And if you live with the same person for 50 years you will acknowledge that there is still a part of that person that remains unknown to you, forever alien, though not necessarily in a bad way.
We like to become different, too. One of the few perks of being a woman is the freedom to change, to become new and amazingly alien every other week, depending on one’s mood, altering hair style, cosmetics, jewelry and piercings (the cyborg again). As a benighted male, I can only guess that women put up with some decidedly impractical fashions—heels, for example—simply for the sake of the transformation of suddenly growing two inches taller and walking with a studied grace. Some of us hippies dressed in a way that we knew would make us stand out as “freaks,” a common word for us at the time. Men with long hair and beads; women who did not shave—truly alien to some of the older generation, which was exactly what we wanted.
On the social margins, the urge to go alien becomes fully unleashed. Think David Bowie, a sort of pioneer of the pursuit of strangeness. The exuberance of some of the not just un- but anti-conventional fashions “out there” makes me feel like smiling with delight sometimes. Glam, drag, some of the outlandish outfits of the BDSM crowd—it is the joys of otherness. When we are young, we have Halloween. Simply putting on a mask transforms us into another identity, human, animal, alien, none of the above. Children love it. Choosing an avatar in a video game is another way of becoming another self. Superheroes have costumes to symbolize their difference—the first and most famous of them, Superman, is literally an alien. Two of his fellow superheroes don costumes to become respectively a spider and a bat, among the most alien members of the animal kingdom. The Renaissance delighted in costuming as well: kings, nobles, bishops, Popes wore robes, ruffles, elaborately embroidered garments, rings and pendants, long elaborate hairstyle. The plain style that we have inherited comes from the Puritans, who disapproved of such wild display and demanded a sober sameness, grey and unadorned. Which leads to the context of sexuality. Sexuality is polymorphous, but we are rather desperately pretending that it is not, or really only just slightly, nothing too extreme. Any (non-abusive) sexual fantasy we do not share strikes us as alien, but for a partner it may be exotic, spicy. It may involve costuming and role play in the bedroom to become something other than the familiar, predictable selves we are by day. Familiarity is safe, but in the long haul it can get boring, and the energy of the relationship may dwindle. In the bedroom, people may become unknown to each other again.
And yet this genuine zest for difference co-exists with a deep fear of it, especially difference within the self. The depth psychology of Freud and Jung has always generated a great deal of ambivalence, at times eliciting a hostile dismissal that is clearly defensive. Freud understood this reaction and expected it. When the ego encounters the unconscious, it is the discovery of a second self, an alien self that speaks an unknown language of dreams and symptoms. The radical French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said that “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.” Lacan is notoriously cryptic, but at least one thing the aphorism means is that our desires do not originate with the ego but with the Other, the unconscious, a fact that appalls the ego. To those who are extremely repressed, it is like being inhabited by one of Ridley Scott’s aliens. A famous dramatization of being possessed by the internal Other is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in which a disturbed woman tries to pull off the wallpaper whose design seems like a prison for a woman she sees within the wall. At the end of the story, the first-person narrator cries, “I’ve escaped,” and we realize that it is the woman from behind the wallpaper who has replaced the original woman. It is psychosis, the voice of the Other replacing the ego self.
But even to those who are more “normal,” the experience of the unconscious is Zoroaster meeting himself in the garden, an “uncanny” experience, to use one of Freud’s own words for it. The fantasist Harlan Ellison has a story called “Shatterday,” in which a man absent-mindedly dials his home number—and he answers. Out of the mad Ophelia in Hamlet comes the voice of the Other, saying, “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but not what we might be” (4.5. 47-49). The first sentence refers to a medieval story in which Christ turns the baker’s daughter into an owl for begrudging him bread, a story that could have come right out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which contains over 200 tales in which both gods and human beings are transformed into trees, birds, wolves, and even stranger things like echoes, into the Other. Magicians and such beings as Proteus in the Odyssey are voluntary shapeshifters, but the speech of Pythagoras in the final book of the Metamorphoses makes clear that the transformation of self into other is the process of life itself. Why Pythagoras? Because he, or his school, preached a doctrine of reincarnation: the spirit “wanders through change.” But Ovid’s Pythagoras makes clear that, whether or not souls actually transmigrate, ordinary human life is one continuous process of becoming alien to the ego that clings to the notion of a stable, familiar identity, of “I.” As Rimbaud famously said, “I is an other.” The embryo in the ultrasound photo is an alien—like Caliban, part fish, with gills. As we age, our bodies become other: Ovid has Helen of Troy wondering who that old crone in the mirror might be who once was the most beautiful woman in the world. And finally, to return whence initiated this meditation, we arrive at death, the final otherness, Hamlet staring at the skull of Yorick. A kindred spirit to Hamlet was Dylan Thomas. To say that Thomas feared death is misleading: more accurately, he was a visionary who perceived the presence of death within life, not in the future, but in the present: "I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail / Wearing the quick away.” Death sits within us like the alien in the Alien films.
The human race cannot bear such a thought, and so projects the Other in the form of gods. There is an extraordinary letter of Rilke about this:
Let us agree that from his earliest beginnings man has created gods in whom just the deadly and menacing and destructive and terrifying elements in life were contained--its violence, its fury, its impersonal bewilderment—all tied together into one thick knot of malevolence: something alien to us, if you wish but something which let us admit that we were aware of it, endured it, even acknowledged it for the sake of a sure, mysterious relationship and inclusion in it. For we were this too; only we didn’t know what to do with this side of our experience. (268)
Then, in a breathtaking leap, he says:
And then, you see, the same thing happened with death. Experienced, yet not to be fully experienced by us in its reality, continually overshadowing us yet never truly acknowledged, forever violating and surpassing the meaning of life—it too was banished and expelled…[it] now became something external, held farther away from us every day, a presence that lurked somewhere in the void, read to pounce upon this person or that in its evil choice. (269)
Yeats makes the same leap when he says, in a poem called “Death,” “Man knows death to the bone. / Man has created death.” What would it mean to stop projecting death as the Other? It would mean that we would become the Other, not entirely, which would be a transcendence beyond the human condition, but to experience as the Other, or what Jung called the Self, even as we remain the limited ego haunted by the anxiety that it and everything it loves is going to die. This is what Northrop Frye meant by the title of his last book, The Double Vision, written just before he himself died. In such an epiphany or peak experience, as Rilke says in his letter, “everywhere around us, death is at home, and it watches us out of the cracks in Things, and a rusty nail that sticks out of a plank somewhere, does nothing day and night except rejoice over death” (269). This is a consummation devoutly to be wished, yet not by suicide but by its opposite. Eric J. Sundquist points out that Dylan Thomas read Rilke together with his friend and fellow poet Vernon Watkins. It is impossible to say how much direct influence there was, but there is an undeniable affinity of vision. Thomas’s later poems attempt, like Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, to follow Rilke’s advice:
Will transformation. Oh be inspired for the flame in which a Thing disappears and bursts into something else; the spirit of re-creation which masters this earthly form loves most the pivoting point where you are no longer yourself. (Sonnet XII, 2nd Part, Stephen Mitchell translation)
The sonnet ends with Ovidian metamorphosis: “And the transfigured Daphne, / as she feels herself become laurel, wants you to change into wind.”
Thomas titles one poem “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” during the air raids of World War II because the child lies “deep with the first dead,” and because, in the poem’s resonant last line, “After the first death, there is no other.” All the possible meanings of this line are true simultaneously. There is no other death, mercifully, because we die only once; there is no “second death” of hellfire as in the Book of Revelation—but also, there is no Other, for the child now and forever is the Other. Such a condition is not an afterlife: the whole point is that it is here and now. Christ says in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas that the kingdom is spread upon the earth but men do not see it. Frye ends The Double Vision by saying:
There is nothing so unique about death as such, where we may be too distracted by illness or sunk in senility to have much identity at all. In the double vision of a spiritual and a physical world simultaneously present, every moment we have lived through we have also died out of into another order. Our life in the resurrection, then is already here, and waiting to be recognized.
The word “alien” means “strange,” and, as Jim Morrison tells us, people are strange when you’re a stranger. But, as we observed in a previous newsletter, the primary law of hospitality tells us we must take in the stranger, the alien, to say welcome and treat them as a friend. One day, that stranger will be Death himself, who has been waiting to be recognized, not just as the annihilator but also as the decreator, who leads you not out of the world but into the midst of it.
Note: Apologies for the number of typos in the last newsletter, which was written in the midst of difficulties. A small part of it was composed while waiting in the emergency room after an encounter with the alien Other: I had to get tetanus and rabies shots after trying to deal with a sick and dying raccoon. (I joke with my students by telling them that they get extra credit for creative excuses). I might add that the newsletter continues to function as an antenna picking up the vibes of current preoccupations: two days after I finished writing on the cult of achievement and workload, Bernie Sanders proposed reducing the work week to 32 hours.
References
Frye, Northrop. The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. University of Toronto Press, 1991. Also in Northrop Frye on Religion. Edited by Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. Volume 4 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Jung, C.G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Revised edition. Vintage, 1965.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. Edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. Vintage, 2009.
Sundquist, Eric J. “Dylan Thomas and Rilke.” In Comparative Literature. Duke University Press. Vol. 31, No. 1 (Winter 1979), 67-78.